I have an issue with the 'spontaneous' in there - do you mean a deliberate explosion releases a different amount of energy?:)Actually, you mean if it all goes off at the same time. But that's not true either, I believe - you'd get the same amount of energy, over a longer period of time, by slowly decomposing the TNT

Where else would it explode?Did you expect it to move through the atmosphere at incredible speed without being affected, so it could explode lower down? Asteroids do not choose which part of the Earth to hit - there's atmosphere everywhere, and hence that's what they hit. The atmosphere compresses to create a bubble of heat and the asteroid burns up - explodes.As for EMP - this was not a nuclear explosion (which releases part of its energy directly as EM radiation). It was a mechanical explosion. Heat. Now a huge amount of heat does create EM radiation - just like something can glow red, then white, it will also glow in X-ray and eventually gamma rays (IANAP). But if there was enough energy to make an EMP, there would also be enough surviving material to hit the surface. And also we'd all be dead.

sorry, no "ballistic trajectory". And that's a strong point.Russia still has a missile tracking system. We all still do. We didn't shut them off after the end of the Cold War.These systems do not recognize something moving at ~60kmph as a missile - because it is not possible that such a projectile originated on Earth. We'd have noticed the launch - and the launch would have killed more people than the hit.This is something that exploded on impact with the atmosphere - not where ballistic missiles explode, and totally destroying it if it was a ballistic missile.To put it another way, if the asteroid was made of plutonium, you'd have a tiny eetsy bit of a radiation problem which you can easily shrug off. The mechanical result would have been the same.

Short story: There is an order-of-magnitude difference in speed, which makes the meteor impossible to track with missile-tracking systems, and these systems assume anything moving that fast is not a missile (because of the physical impossibility of it)

Hmmm... I think perhaps that's the point.Everything is regulated, and has government intervention in it. Everything.Anything without any government in it is a purely private personal matter, and not done by corporations or places of business.

Umm... as a customer, I allow a store to take my money. I'm not forced to use Walmart, or Target, or Rami Levy. They're not a public institution. If I don't want to give them money, I either take only free samples or I don't enter the storeThis is ridiculous. As a customer I willingly hand over my money for a product. Why the hell should the government get involved here and impose a sales tax?

How would they gain an advantage when releasing their better product as open source?You can make a street so great it'll be better than any night club. But you still won't be making any money."I started with the advantage. I kept the advantage the entire fight. And then I lost"

In half a year, things may actually look rosy to the people who jump on the bandwagon. I say, let's ask again in about three, or five years. Sometimes, it takes time for an evil plan to come to fruition.

How is this comment a troll?There's no statement of a false fact here. There is no statement of any fact. There is an opinion, and it's not offensive or unrelated or anything that might be called a troll.

Slashdot does not have '-1 disagree'. '-1 troll' is definitely not the right substitute

7) Microsoft is starting to allow their own products like ASP.NET MVC to go FOSS.

Let me know if/when they ever finish that, until then it's like taking most of the mines out of a field.

I'd say it's like taking the mines out of the middle of the field, or just one edge. So there's still no way to cross it without getting blown up.(FOSS? Last I heard, Microsoft's released code was more like - don't modify this, this is not what we compile internally, it's for reading not for compiling, here have a lawyer cookie)

If Nvidia or AMD did this to support their video cards, we would all be cheering about what a great thing this was. So why is it different for Microsoft?

Because Nvidia and AMD sell hardware.When Microsoft releases open source drivers for the hardware it sells, we all celebrate.Here, Microsoft releases open source code that provides support for their software. If you don't own that software, and the contribution is not intellectually fulfilling in any way, you gained nothing. The unwritten assumption here is that hardware is good for something, and you buy it to do that thing for you. You don't buy software so you don't have Microsoft's software platform to need support for. It's an assumption of complete lack of commercial software. It's probably valid in some academic circles

In other news, I agree that it's stupid to be angry at present Microsoft for things we felt back in the 90s. Microsoft is a corporation. Like people, it can change over time. And like crimes have a statue of limitations, the blame liability suffered by Microsoft must be finite. Otherwise they truly have no reason to become good - if they'll always be judged as evil.